When Vegetables Attack!

Got-Dam $%#&@*}% Orange, Green & Yellow Peril!

In the continuing effort to find tasty lo-cal foodstuffs with which to stuff my face, I came upon a display of dried "veggie chips" at the local market.

The brand name was Sunwell, a Chinese company. (Website is full of delightful "Engrish".) They offered bags of dried, salted & chipped sweet potatoes, green beans, onions, carrots and a mix of all four.

Despite the danger that the chips might be chock-full of melamine, lead, cadmium, internal organs of executed political prisoners and whatever else the Chinese have been caught using as additives, I decided to give them a try. After all, a whole bag of the mixed veggies only totaled 400 calories.

The result? Pretty tasty! Well, except for the green beans. They tasted like green-colored styrofoam peanuts. The sweet potato chips were very good, and the carrots weren't bad.

The onion chips, though... Oh, mama! Imagine a big chip that tastes like a Funyun, only 10 times better, and 1/10 the calories. Sweet, oniony, melt-in-your mouth, and light as a feather.

So, I plowed through most of the bag. Ate the rest as an afternoon snack.

And then, the troubles began...

See, I was also drinking three large bottles of flavored seltzer-water. The seltzer was sugar-free, but it was the carbonation and the amount of liquid that was the catalyst for the impending intestinal cataclysm.

All those dried vegetables started reconstituting, mixing with that bubbly water to form an effervescent fibrous blob that scoured through my GI tract like a snowplow.

I knew something was amiss last night at the poker party, when I just couldn't sit comfortably due to the stampeding vegetation in my gut.

I excused myself a little early, and headed home before any little surprises started working their way out. Upon arriving at the house, I dropped a deuce of standard proportions for a guy on a reduced calorie diet, and thought that would be the end of it.

Oh, no... It was just the beginning.

I got up this morning after sleeping late and went over to the local cinema to catch a matinee. (Edge of Darkness, if you must know...)

After leaving the theater, the walk back to the truck must have knocked something loose, 'cause as I unlocked the door I was nearly doubled over by gut rumblings topping 7.6 on the Richter Scale. All was not well in Colonville...

I debated going back into the theater to avail myself of the facilities, but home was a straight shot up the Beltway, no more than a mile or so distant. I could make it. Besides, you always play better at Bowl Games with home-field advantage.

I got lucky with the traffic light at the Interstate, and blew through the next one up the road as it passed through that nebulous orange state between yellow and red. There was no way I could have lasted through a long cycle...

I managed to hold the truck to the speed limit through the subdivision, but on the home stretch I left a little rubber on the pavement as I turned onto my street and slid to a stop in my driveway.

Have you ever tried to walk quickly while clenching your buttcheeks and holding your balloon knot shut by sheer force of will? I'm sure I looked like a senior citizen missing his walker that took a handful of uppers along with his Geritol.

Inside the front door I paused to lock the door, a decision that nearly caused a blowout requiring FEMA, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to deal with. A minute or so of slow breathing and laserlike focus on sphincter closure and the peristalsis was halted by enough mental concentration to bend a drawerful of teaspoons. The duckwaddle down the hall continued...

The last few seconds were nip & tuck, or rather, strip and untuck, followed by a scene not too dissimilar from when the Apollo 11 lunar lander made its final approach, main exhaust spewing even before touchdown was complete.

Vegetation and carbonation formed a pretty strong thrust, but luckily I'd installed a tall & wide ADA-compliant throne several years back, and the industrial-strength thundermug was up to the task of reining in the explosion.

So, heed my warning, buoys and gulls! Limit your servings of dried vegetable chips to no more than a handful or two, lest ye suffer the consequences!!

You have been warned!!